Crowdsourcing is an innovative business trend that takes collaborative work to a whole new level. Around the world, individuals are using online communities to identify people with similar experiences or interests who can share ideas, offer their expertise, and collectively accomplish work.
A lot of people have never heard of crowdsourcing. But if you’ve ever edited a Wikipedia article, uploaded a video to YouTube, or tried beta software, consider yourself an official participant. Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or a third-party provider and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. Using the technique, an organization can tap into the collective intelligence and expertise of the public at large to complete the task. Crowdsourcing can include anything from gathering feedback on a new idea, asking for help to solve a problem, or actually accomplishing the task at hand.
Crowdsourcing isn’t a magic tool for solving all problems, but consider the benefits of turning to a larger community to tap into their expertise or get feedback and new ideas. What ideas do you have that could benefit from crowdsourcing?
The Church uses crowdsourcing
The Family History Record Extraction program is an example of crowdsourcing. People around the world contribute their time and talents in a defined process to perform controlled work. The curriculum development process is another example of crowdsourcing. Committees of members are tasked with writing lesson manuals. Before lesson manuals are printed, lessons are sent to teachers in many countries to test the lessons in actual classroom settings and provide feedback.
In what new ways would you suggest the Church consider crowdsourcing?
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How about making some Church software open source? There are many members with excellent software development skills who would be willing to contribute to such projects.
If opening the code to the entire world is more than the Church is willing to do, perhaps they could create code.lds.org which only permits Church members to access the source code and submit patches.
You can try to use crowdsourcing to translate Church material in multiple languages.
Missionary work online can also benefit from crowdsourcing. Elder Ballard request to participate in the online discussion about the Church is a nice way to use crowdsourcing and expand member missionary work.
However, the Family History Record Extraction program is a more targeted way of crowdsourcing and it is very well organized, but I suppose that the work for people on the other side of the veil is always easier to organize than the work with people on this side.
“Crowdsourcing,” like any collaborative mechanism, has the added benefit of engaging the participant in the discussion. If their ideas are used, and often even if they are not, they feel pulled to the success of the idea.
Suggestion: Missionary work? Try our stuff out on members to help them become more motivated to do missionary work; try it out on non-members to better understand communicating with them, and to engage them in a productive dialogue.
I’d throw out members could help with providing and analyzing feedback of Church instructional materials (summative evaluation).
I think elements of the Church publications, Ensign/Liahona, could be crowd sourced, specifically pictures, stories, news updates.
I would love to see expansions and revisions of the LDS Hymnbook through crowdsourcing, particularly for the international church. Perhaps members around the world could submit youtube videos or mp3 versions of themselves performing original works which they would like to see published in their local hymnbook. It would be similar to the international art competition but digital. I think it could be a mix of wider membership, expert panel, and church administration on the judging side of things. This would accelerate the artistic richness of the church, particularly for members outside of the U.S. who have few resources in terms of recording or studio equipment or connections to the church music committee but who could nonetheless could use a simple digital camera to record their creativity and artistic expression of their testimony. We need to discover the equivalent of what W.W. Phelps was for the musical artistic explosion that occurred in early Church History but in Ghana, Korea, India etc. That’s what I would love to see.